You know it’s a disease
but you treat it like a crime;
you hurl them into prison
and you make them do their time.
You never care to help them,
you just draw a broken line,
and drop them on the street again
pretending they’ll be fine.

The jails are full to bursting
with those you call convicts
but most of them are nothing more
than desperate drug addicts.
They’re not hardened criminals,
but people who are sick.
They don’t wish to harm you,
they just need another fix.

So treat it as an illness,
please try to understand
a pandemic of addiction
is raging through the land.
You politicians know the truth
but will not lend a hand;
how can we hope to help these folk
while this disease is banned?

She’s done it this time;
cut off her sticky road to death
with a silly drug theft.

Already she has caned her stolen cache
grabbed less than a week ago; a four-day binge
and now she’s finished, a pariah, hated for what she did.
She’s robbed the only one left who would give her
not only the time of day, but drugs for free.
there is no-one to turn to, even if
she had the money to pay.

Today
I feel little pity
even for my sick children
who sit carefully apart,
each sunk in their
own, individual
rock-bottom
hell.

My son
looked at the sky,
saw a light, but he let it escape,
and went back to familiar tricks and lies.
My daughter sits atop a mountain of fear and pain,
in a stinking, vomit-strewn room, wriggling, retching;
with no straw to grab, she clutches her liquid stomach.
She stole the last straw, and it broke the dealer’s back.

Her only option may be rehabilitation.

I must not dwell on her agony, only on the hope
that she will soon be free within her mind;
although in three days her body
may be transported
to jail.

Determined to deny
my aching weight of pain
I force the faintest wry smile across my face.
My whirling dervish has committed a deluge of terrible crimes
against family, friends, enemies, those she loves, those she hates
and those to whom she is indifferent. They litter her history
in various states of health and decomposition,
but my daughter is to be punished
for the crime of shoplifting
and failing to abide
by the court’s
decision.